After an assault, detectives generally attempt to identify the attacker by showing the victim or witnesses portraits of individuals contained in a police database in order to enable the victim or the witnesses to recognize the attacker therein. Another method of identification consists in reconstituting the face of the attacker by making a composite (Identikit) portrait with the help of the victim or the witnesses. Unfortunately, it can happen that the victim or the witnesses repress, forget, are too frightened to say, or did not consciously see the face of the attacker, thus making an identification of the attacker by those methods impossible. In addition, consulting databases of portraits or making a composite portrait are operations that are relatively lengthy and require sustained attention on the part of the victim, who is generally upset or in a state of shock, or indeed injured. These operations are thus particularly arduous for the victim and also for the witnesses who may likewise be suffering emotionally.
Document WO-A-94/08311 thus describes a method of searching a database of portraits for police purposes, in which portraits are selected as a function of a characteristic that the witness judges to be important.
Document US-A-2003/108241 discloses a method of consulting a database that has previously been sorted as a function of a connection between the data and the emotional state of a habitual user, the consultation comprising, at the beginning of a consultation of the database, a step of detecting at least one physiological parameter of the user that is representative of the user's emotional state, so as subsequently to present to the user data that corresponds to said emotional state. Implementing that method assumes that the data has previously been given a parameter that is representative of emotional state as a function of the user, since the search is performed on the basis of that parameter. This is not applicable to searching through a database when the user is confronted with that database for the first time. Furthermore, that method is not usable if numerous users are likely to make use of that database.
In a similar approach, document US-A-2003/165270 proposes marking images presented to an observer as a function of the reaction of the observer viewing those images.
The document “Identifying faces using multiple retrievals” (Kian Kang Wu et al., IEEE Multimedia, IEEE Computer Society, US, Vol. 1, No. 2, Jun. 21, 1994) discloses a method of searching a database by using parameters that are weighted as a function of their importance, and the document “Modeling using subjectivity in image libraries” (Picard, Minutes de la Conférence Internationale de Traitement de l'image ICIP [Minutes of the International Conference on Image Processing], Lausanne, IEEE, US, Vol. 16, Sep. 16, 1996) describes a method of evaluating the similarity of two images.